Leftist meddler extraordinaire George Soros has named President Obama’s far-left ambassador to South Africa, Patrick Gaspard, as acting president of his philanthropic network, the Open Society Foundations (OSF), effective at the end of the year.
There is an excellent chance Soros, who turned 87 last month, will make the appointment of Gaspard permanent since there will reportedly not even be a perfunctory executive search process. There is no reason to look any further: Gaspard is seen by many of his leftist colleagues — such as David Axelrod — as having largely the same set of skills as the politically talented master community organizer Barack Obama. He is, essentially, the ideal candidate to head up the anti-social charity that is devoted to destroying civil society and promoting social engineering in America and elsewhere.
The paywalled Wall Street Journal article by Juliet Chung more or less says Gaspard is the permanent choice to run OSF. “No search is planned for either the president or the vice president posts, said an Open Society spokeswoman,” the report states. It adds, “The foundation spokeswoman said Open Society’s focus wouldn’t change under Mr. Gaspard.”
This is probably correct. The danger is that Gaspard, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee, is considered to be a low-key, hyper-competent, media-savvy, radical agitator. He can make things happen, potentially very bad things, without leaving his fingerprints behind. He is very effective. His appointment by Soros makes it clear the gazillionaire plans to step up his assaults on civil society in favor of the weird abstraction he calls the open society.
According to BlackPast,
Gaspard was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo to Haitian parents. His father, a lawyer, moved the family to the African nation after Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba issued an appeal for French-speaking intellectuals of African descent to relocate there after the Congo’s independence. After Lumumba’s death in 1961, Gaspard’s family then moved to New York City, New York when he was three years old. Gaspard got his start in politics in the late 1980s, when he began working as a community organizer. […] In 1988, Gaspard worked on Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign. In 1989, he worked on David Dinkins’s New York City mayoral bid. […] Gaspard’s visibility in New York City politics propelled him onto the national stage. In 2004, he served on Howard Dean’s Democratic presidential primary campaign as national deputy field director. After Dean’s defeat, Gaspard worked as national field director for America Coming Together, which was a progressive political action organization that strived to increase voter participation.
America Coming Together was a corrupt “527” organization that shut down after the Federal Election Commission (FEC) imposed a record-breaking fine of $775,000 on it for 2004 violations of campaign finance laws.
BlackPast continues:
Beginning in June 2008, Gaspard worked on behalf of another presidential hopeful, signing on as Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s national political director. After Obama’s victory, Gaspard stayed on to serve as associate personnel director of President-elect Obama’s transition team. From 2009 to 2011 he worked in the White House as assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Political Affairs. As President Obama approached the end of his first term and his re-election bid ramped up, Gaspard moved over to the Democratic National Committee, where he held the position of executive director from 2011 to 2013. Gaspard has also served as the Executive Vice President and Political Director of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). In spring 2013, President Obama nominated Gaspard for the post of United States Ambassador to the Republic of South Africa. After U.S. Senate confirmation, Gaspard was sworn in on August 26, 2013.
Gaspard also worked for New York’s Working Families Party, which was founded by and an appendage of the now-defunct ACORN network.
The WSJ article misses some of the key facts about Soros. She writes:
Mr. Soros, a billionaire investor and Hungarian refugee from the Holocaust, founded the global philanthropy network to promote human rights. Mr. Soros is a major donor to liberal causes and supported Hillary Clinton in the last election.
Mr. Soros and Open Society have given away billions of dollars to a network of foundations they sponsor. Open Society focuses on issues as varied as increasing access to medicines, protecting the rights of criminal defendants and advocating for the dignified treatment of migrants.
In his mind, perhaps, Soros focuses on promoting human rights. To him, human rights include the right to riot, enter and live in the U.S. illegally and demand to be treated the same as U.S. citizens, murder police officers, and in general to not be held accountable for one’s crimes, especially if one is a member of a racial or ethnocultural minority.
The WSJ describes Soros as “a billionaire investor and Hungarian refugee from the Holocaust, [who] founded the global philanthropy network to promote human rights” and “is a major donor to liberal causes and supported Hillary Clinton in the last election.”
Soros is actually persona non grata in Hungary. He was also a Nazi collaborator during the German occupation of Hungary, as Dinesh D’Souza reminded Americans lately. He describes Soros as “a chief financial supporter of Antifa” who “was himself a Nazi collaborator and to this day has no regrets[.]”
As ZeroHedge noted recently, Israel has branded Soros, an atheist of Jewish descent, a “threat” to the Jewish state, accusing him of “continuously undermining Israel’s democratically elected governments” and asserting that Soros-funded groups “defame the Jewish state and seek to deny it the right to defend itself.”
Some have suggested Soros be extradited to Israel.
This article first appeared Sept. 12, 2017, at Bombthrowers.